Sustainability and National Ideology

• In Event: Perceptions of sustainability from the Global-South: curriculum and textbooks in Malaysia, Mexico, India, and Pakistan.

Proposal

The transition from a vision of education as a driver of economic grow (Philips & Schweisfurth, 2014; Psacharopoulos, 1972) to a paradigm based on sustainability poses the urgency to recognize the power inequalities created by capitalism. Furthermore, this includes challenging hegemonic understandings about the environment and nature. Based on Gramsci’s (1971; 2007) concept of hegemony and the author’s notions on the role of education, this paper argues that the longer-term cost of an education that promises modernity and development has its origins in the spread of national ideologies during the 20th Century.

This research takes post revolutionary Mexico (1920s-1960s) as an example of how a national ideology concealed exploitative notions of the environment, thus incorporating national territories, and the natural resources contained within them, to capitalist markets. While researchers have focused on the study of recognizable symbols, practices, and discourses created and disseminated as national (Vaughan & Lewis 2006), this paper focuses on ideas about the environment and nature that are relevant to evaluate the longer-term cost of a modernizing and developmentalist education of the Mexican population. From a historical approach and a Gramscian perspective, this paper uses textbook analysis to study the first generation of public textbooks (CONALITEG, 1961) as the result of Mexico’s post revolutionary regime in forging one of the strongest cultural nations. This research concludes that behind romanticized and nationalist visions of the environment, there are exploitative and capitalist understandings that compromise current efforts towards a sustainable development.

References
Psacharopoulos, G. (1972). Rates of return to investment in education around the world.
Comparative Education Review, 16(1), 54-67.
Phillips, D., & Schweisfurth, M. (2014). Comparative and international education: An
introduction to theory, method, and practice (Second ed.). London: Bloomsbury.
Comisión Nacional de Libros de Texto Gratuitos, CONALITEG (1961). Generación 1960.
Retrieved from https://goo.gl/4QQeR4
Vaughan, M., & Lewis, S. (2006). The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution
in Mexico, 1920-1940. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Author

• Yver Melchor, Loyola University Chicago